Contact, change and class in post-war Britain

A good example of a middle-class led phonological change in British English is that of the vowel in a set of monosyllables ending in a front consonant including off, cloth and lost, which changed over the course of the twentieth century from  to . The change worked its way outwards from the intermediate classes, but took longest to reach the peripheral classes at the very top and bottom of the hierarchy, who were most socially isolated, and retained the conservative  pronunciation (stereotypically Get orf!, Oh Gawd!) long after most people had switched to .

Few people still use  in this context today, but progress of the change in the 1970s made for some unlikely bedfellows, with Harrow-educated equestrian commentator Dorian Williams using the same  vowel as fictional working-class bigot Alf Garnett, played by Warren Mitchell in the popular sitcom Till Death Us Do Part.

We need, in conclusion, to use the term ‘natural change’ with great care. Processes that linguists have hitherto assumed to be natural may well only be so for the modern high-contact, urbanized societies with which they happen to be most familiar, but which historically have not been the norm. The effects of contact and isolation on linguistic change have led linguists in recent years to question the equi-complexity hypothesis, namely the axiomatic view that all natural languages are equally complex. Keen to dispel myths about ‘primitive’ or ‘inferior’ languages, which have no basis in fact, linguists have staunchly maintained that ‘all languages are equal’ and point out, for example, that children across the globe acquire their mother tongue, whatever it may be, in roughly the same amount of time.

But languages may, in fact, be unequally complex from the perspective of the post-adolescent learner: Vietnamese, for example, is likely to pose more problems than Spanish for a native speaker of English, but the reverse may well be true for a Chinese speaker. Faroese and Danish may seem equally straightforward to their native speakers, but for outsiders Faroese undoubtedly presents additional challenges by virtue of its greater morphosyntactic complexity. Moreover, if we accept that some changes, typically those which occur in high-contact areas, do result in simplification, then the equi-complexity thesis can be maintained only if every change of the ‘simplifying’ kind is necessarily matched by a corresponding increase in complexity elsewhere in the system.